Microbial communities have evolved immense enzymatic capabilities. In particular, anaerobic fungi perform metabolic feats which potentially could be adapted for great benefit. For example, the efficient conversion of biomass into fuels could provide humankind with an inexpensive, unlimited, and environmentally sustainable source of energy. However, current biomass conversion technologies are not economically scalable due to the recalcitrance of woody biomass. While humans have struggled to effectively capture energy from biomass, anaerobic fungi efficiently convert such material into many billions of joules of energy each day, in the digestive tracts of herbivores. These organisms have evolved efficient enzymatic machinery to break down cellulosic material in lignin rich plant material.
In addition to efficiently breaking down biomolecules, anaerobic fungi are able to synthesize complex natural products which are difficult or impossible to make using synthetic chemistry. Fungi have rich enzymatic abilities which create a diversity of biologically active molecules. Roughly 40% of drugs in use today were derived from fungi, for example, including antibiotics such as penicillin, chemotherapeutics such as vincristine or vinblastine, and cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins. The prevalence of useful biomolecules produced by fungi is enabled by their unique enzymatic capabilities.
While the potential of fungi to improve bioproduction technologies is huge, large numbers of fungal species cannot contribute because they are not amenable to culture, isolation, and study. Anaerobic fungi in particular are very difficult to culture compared to model organisms such as aerobic bacteria or yeast. The anaerobic fungi have therefore been severely underrepresented in bioprospecting efforts due to the bottlenecks associated with their study.
Advantageously, the inventors of the present disclosure have developed methodologies for the culture of anaerobic fungi. This development has enable the isolation and characterization of organisms which were never previously studied. From this work, novel species of gut fungi have been isolated and their transcriptomes have been sequenced, revealing a multitude of new genes and proteins that can be used in energy production, in the synthesis of novel compounds, and in other applications.